Perlmonks Haunted by the Ghost of Wassercrats

A reminder: the author of this Journal is known over at Perlmonks.org as Intrepid.

There is a haunting going on over at Perlmonks.org, and I thought I
should say something about it, although what effect my doing so could
have on the situation, I do not know.

A former participant at Perlmonks named himself with the decidely odd
handle "Wassercrats" and proceeded to become an active poster in the
Perlmonks community. During his rather brief period of activity there
(in 2004), he did not endear himself to the general user community by
posting nodes such as http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=386089
or this http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=323102... to say he
was eager in his presentation of extremely unpopular opinions would
be, uhhh, a mild understatement. His manner both in the Perlmonks
Chatterbox (site chat facility) and in his nodes (writeups) was one
that brought him notoriety beyond that of any participant before or
since, despite the truth that many Monks would have preferred that
he be forgotten as quickly as possible. In fact his negative fame is
of such magnitude and persistance that just this evening, before
composing this entry, he was brought up in the Chatterbox by one of
the regulars.

It has occured to me both this evening and at other times in the past
that "Wassercrats" haunts Perlmonks with a tenacity that bears noting
for its cautionary import.

"Wassercrats" left Perlmonks in a cloud of acrimony and a stench of
bitterness. He became more and more defiant over the course of his
history there, "shouting" much invective against the wall of community opinion
that was his subjective experience at Perlmonks. That written invective
(much of which is now, to my understanding, in nodes that have been
put "away" by editorial staff) always seemed to be calculated to make
those reading more inclined to regard him with contempt, rather than
to win friends or even make people slightly more inclined to tolerate
him.

However, I myself was present at times late in "Wassercrats" brief
tenure when I witnessed him in the Chatterbox behaving in a mild,
friendly and jovial manner with those present, or attempting to (I'd
add in explanation that although I have been a participant at Perlmonks
since only shortly after its unveiling, I have taken periods of varying
duration "off" and had not been attentive continuously for this
accounted timespan). I noticed with a considerable degree of personal
discomfort that his attempts to enjoy chatting amiably with others
were met with a constant rebuff of attacks and mean-spirited put-downs,
attempts to pull him back into past disputes, and similar bad-intentioned
attempts at emotional manipulation on the part of nearly every Chatterbox-monk
who was reacting to his presence in any way.

I was personally disconcerted by the degree of antagonism shown a
person who was, in my perception, clearly weary of being at odds
with an entire user community and longing for a little simple company... but I was even more disturbed by the fact that not one speaker
at a time, but several in tandem were exibiting this aggressive
hostility. It simply wasn't possible to witness without there being
a vision of a bunch of little boys standing around a single skinny
(or overweight) kid taunting and throwing things at him.

I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that a considerably number of
persons at Perlmonks, manyof them still regulars there, behaved in
a really despicable fashion towards "Wassercrats". His penchant for
self-promotion, for making broad characterizations of the Perlmonks
community, his abrasive, confrontational style, his attempts to
"critique" the Perl language and its cultural conventions without
establishing any "cred" for himself first: yes, all these things
made his poor reception inevitable. But these alone do not
excuse a part of a community of people for becoming a mob
and behaving in the manner that they did.

I hope the knowledgable reader will forgive my doing a brief bit
of tangential prose at this point. I am afraid that the extremely
underdeveloped ethical sense of some of the potential readers of
this journal make it seem necessary to me.

In the study of human social history and literature, the study of
the mind and of symbol and metaphor throughout known human history,
we come upon a phenomenon which has come to be known (in English)
as the scapegoat. A scapegoat is a person who is made to
suffer by a village or community; and whose being made a sacrifice
by that community somehow sooths the anxieties or fears of the
mass of members of that community. The part of the word that is "goat"
readily summons to mind the image of domesticated livestock being
tied to a post and killed with a sharp knife or a dull club.

"Wassercrats" was a scapegoat. The "Monks" over there at Perlmonks
who became thirsty to see his blood (which is to say, in the
non-metaphorical sense, to quit ever using Perlmonks again,
preferably accompanied by a parting blast of hurt and anger - all
my readers have seen such a "flame-out" and know what I am describing)... these folks became inebriated
with one of the most ancient and malevolent of humanity's intoxicants:
the drive to "kill" the most self-despised flaws in one's own inner/spiritual/moral
being (one's "heart") by "killing" an external symbol of those flaws.

Make no mistake abut it. "Wassercrats" failings were no different
in kind from those of many other Perlmonks; they only differed in the
degree to which they were flagrantly expressed. I witness the same
mental warts surfacing on a daily basis (during a bad week), now
that Wassercrats is long "dead": the premature arrogance of those
who have learned half or 3/4 of what there is to know about some
computer technology, but speak as if they know it all; the utter
ruthlessless in the ego of those who feel challenged on a technical
point (causing them to try any argumentative ploy they think will
work, displaying no regard for whether the truth is being
forgotten in the process); the inability to self-reflect and see
with any clarity that something is clouding their perceptions of
others' intent or meaning. Wassercrats displayed all these foibles
to such an absurdly exaggerated degree that he allowed the onlookers
at Perlmonks to fall under the completely deluded miscomprehension
that they themselves were completely or even mostly free of them.

There are those who may read this entry with no thought other than
how to discourage anything remotely like it from issuing forth
from my not-so-nimble fingers in the future, or how to provoke
(if given the chance) a reaction from me that they think, in a
calculating sense, would lessen my credibility as a witness and
describer of this little morality tale from Perlmonk's recent
past. Those are the people who are in fact not only haunted by
the ghost of Wassercrats, but truly possessed by it.

Those who are most quick to feel a prickle of self-doubt upon
reading this, maybe a touch of shame, are the ones least in need
of entertaining the company of such feelings for any length of time.

Arrogance is apparently widely misunderstood amongst the part of
the Perlmonks community which I've come to know as "the thick-headed
lot." Arrogance is understood as a deceiver in the Buddhist traditions,
those traditions which have made a systematic and thorough
investigation of the different phenomena of human conciousness for
a very long time. Arrogance causes itself to disappear from the
sight of those afflicted by it, so that it can do its chosen work
of undermining the perceptual accuracy as well as the moral standing
of those under its sway. It is a huge blind spot right in front of
the faces of the afflicted, that they cannot see at all. The reason
that Arrogance possesses this capability and manifests this
function in human conciousness is that it is quite vulnerable to
human volition, free will and genuine intellect when it begins to
be exposed. There is no more effective way to raise the ire of
the truly arrogance-bespelled person than to sharply point out
the malfunction in their conciousnesss at this time, that is
being caused by the dominance of Arrogance. The outlashings
of rage (sometimes hot but often cold) that are often witnessed are
the flailings of the threatened disease - they are the infection in the
ego of the afflicted person expressing its urgent need to, beyond all else, avoid
having its name spoken aloud, its existence recognized to its
host and victim.

Arrogance is not merely a minor character defect of the overly-confident
or the perpetually insecure. It is actually a serious, self-perpetuating, chronic
illness that undermines the health of the victim's relationships
with those around him. Many people can smell the rot of that
infection on the afflicted person from a long way off (and avoid
the bearer like they would a plague carrier). Those who are themselves fairly
to severely afflicted cannot, however, in many cases;
they instead often band together for mutual protection, for the
cover that membership in a group provides to them.

Wassercrats provided a part of the Perlmonks community a chance to
project upon a person (in whose defense it was clear that no voices would be raised)...
that group pathology that plagues the intellectually self-congratulatory
and socially insecure. The irony abounds, because some of the Perlmonks
I know from the Chatterbox are Gay, some are lifelong-overweight, some
have speech impediments or learning disabilities, some belong to
ethnic minorities: this is a group of people that taken in totoreally ought to have known better and done better. Not all
Perlmonks are "geeks" (and surely not all are "nerds": some are married
to beautiful spouses, some are beautiful themselves - some are beauty
pageant queens!)... but after all it *does* take a different
sort of person to land in a job administrating a UNIX system all day
long, or writing code until 4am every morning, or working hard enough
to grasp what's up with polymorphic inheritance or lexical closures;-)... a person who is a bit out of the ordinary, anyway.

To those readers from Perlmonks who still mention Wassercrats with a sneer
of prideful contempt, as I saw tonight, I'd just like to remind you that
you really ought to be seriously and non-transiently
ASHAMED of yourselves. When you speak Wassercrat's name, you ought
do so in hushed tones, and with eyes cast downwards. You may be a Perlmonk
now, but the need for you to be a human being is going to last a lot longer.
You need to disengage your overfed head for a moment and engage your malnourished
gut. No victory was accomplished for or by anyone when Wassercrats
left under those conditions.

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Perlmonks is a tribe. I am not ashamed of that, because admission to this particular tribe is freely granted, and explusion requires a demonstrated systematic blatent disregard for sense and sensibility, and unwillingness to just "get" what the tribe is about.

Wassercrats got expelled.

At some point, the tribe members had had enough. There's no formal mechanism for excommunication, as there is with some tribes, so the closest thing is to provide appropriate XP voting and followups, especially linking to

I went back and forth on it, and finally decided that a comment this interesting really required a reply - so at the risk of appearing to merely be trying to get the last word;-) (which isn't the reality)...

It's a reasonable notion and certainly intelligently put forth: that (paraphr) "Perlmonks is a tribe and the tribe expelled Wassercrats". After thinking about the proposal for a bit I realized with a bit of a start that I sensed ESR (Eric Raymond, for those readers who aren't Merlyn, etc)... not tha

There were a few people who defended me on the message board, and Chatterbox wasn't as big a problem as you describe. I wasn't exactly expelled. Someone "considered" one of my posts in violation of the guidelines, and some monks who just barely were able to vote on it voted to "reap" it. Most of the higher monks recognized the injustice, and there was even a suggestion to repost my reaped post. A new rule was created to help prevent such unjust reaping in the future. I still said I was leaving. Then I was a

Ya know... i had really mostly forgotten about Wassercrats until you posted a link to this rant in the Perlmonk's chatterbox today. It really is no surprise that his memory lingers when folks like you continue to keep that memory alive.

It really wouldn't surprise me in the least to discover that YOU are really Wassercrats, Intrepid. You both have a very hard time fitting in with large groups of people.

I missed the original fight; however, I took part in the so called "Ghost" appearence.

Arrogance for all your talk is simply a matter of perception.

The ghost hid behind the guest id and posted material he would not back up. When challenged he (or could I say you?) would simply ignore it as being biased towards O'Reilly, the Perlmonks tribe, or Merlyn.

It's rather simplistic to suggest there is the pathological addiction to attack people b

Wassercrats failings were no different in kind from those of many other Perlmonks; they only differed in the degree to which they were flagrantly expressed.

At least we have found the only flawed humans on Earth; they all frequent Perlmonks, and felt a sick glee when Wassercrats left!

Which isn't to say I didn't feel it -- I did -- but I didn't feel great about feeling that sick glee. I didn't. I felt bad about the fact that Wassercrats seems to have categorized some significant concepts under headings l

On your homenode at Perlmonks, you mention "In plain language: Don't expect to act like a <expletive> in the cb and have it just magically disappear."

Did it ever occur to you that you tend to do this more often than really anybody else?

Also, you were borged from the CB on 2006-06-14 19:43:23 UTC, yet you haven't updated your borg blog. Is this because you have no one to blame this time but yourself? I mean, let's face, you never have anyone to legitimately blame but yourself for your own irrespons